


no-one

by Askance



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Creature Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-12
Updated: 2017-11-12
Packaged: 2019-02-01 02:27:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12695226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: Now, he is thinking of a name.





	no-one

_I._

 

Getting aboard is the hardest part.

 

He's been careful. He's been waiting quietly in the troughs of the waves in the wake of the merchant ship for days, never more than his eyes above water, only daring to draw near long after dark when there was no sound on deck but the creaking of the ropes, the eerie screech of lanterns swaying on their hooks. Even then it is only to run his hand along her keel and slip back under, unseen.

 

He's picked a good body, too. A beautiful boy, many months dead, with curly black hair and merry blue eyes and white, white teeth. A likeable face. Some poor soul who'd never been missed. He'd found him sinking slowly off the Carolina coast, had held his face in his hands long enough to memorize it, and then let him go, down into the black.

 

Now, he is thinking of a name.

 

The schooner is resting easy, anchored in the bay; in the distance he can see the lights of Kingston. He rests for a moment against the side of the ship, unused to the ache in his new legs, waiting for the webbing between his fingers to melt away, watching the lights twinkle. He imagines he can even hear laughter. He swallows a last breath of sea water and pushes his mouth above the surface. It's been a long time since he's been near to lights like those.

 

But there's no delaying; he will have to think while he climbs.

 

He finds the rope dangling overboard, feels the slats of the ladder in the dark. There's little sound as he rises out of the water. The slats are slippery, and he pauses for a moment, resting taut on the rope, listening to the wood creaking, alert for the sounds of men, footsteps, voices. There are none.

 

He breathes, getting his bearings for it. Air is so dry, comparatively. It smells comfortingly enough of salt.

 

Hand over hand, latching and unlatching his fingers on the coarse rope, knocking his unfamiliar knees and toes against the side of the ship, he climbs up, up, and pauses just before his head clears the railing—hangs there again, breathing slowly, looking down at the black water below him.

 

There is no sound. Silently, he hauls himself over the side.

 

He crouches in the dark. Up near the bow, there is a watchman, snoring on a crate, a lantern dangling above his head. In the crow's nest, another figure; but the deck is dark, and he takes the chance. He has only to give it a moment, or two, before he will be safe.

 

The ship is any other ship. He creeps below decks, sees the swinging shadows of so many men in their hammocks. Hands silhouetted, drifting above the floor. Sea-chests against the wall, enough to dig through.

 

He finds a striped shirt that might once have been white; trousers and a belt; a blue coat with four pale buttons. He takes a pair of boots from beneath a hammock with two fingers. No one will ever know that any of it is missing. No one will ever question where he came from. This ship is any other ship.

 

A name. He's gone so long without one.

 

He finds an empty hammock—the man who owns it, he reckons, ashore, or gone, or something other—and steadies himself there. Takes a deep breath. Exhales it in time with the slow tilt of the ship.

 

On a post nearby, something glints. He looks toward it. Something on a thread, hung from a nail above a faceless man's head, swaying gently. Every so often it catches the moonlight. Flashes silver.

 

* * *

 

Jamaica has fallen far away behind them, and he has always been there. Some men look at him quizzically, as if trying to remember something they cannot know, but soon enough it fades. They give him things to do. They avoid him for a while; he makes them uneasy, though they don't know why. But eventually he ingratiates himself enough to earn a smile, a quip, a slap on the back. He grins. Goes about his work. Lets his palms go rough as ropes pass over them. Fills his fingers with splinters. He relishes feeling more than any of them can understand. The first time a cable slices open his hand, he savors the sight of red blood in quiet until someone passes him a kerchief to bind it up.

 

In port cities he hangs back—everyone likes him, but no one is his friend; he prefers to watch, anyway—see people walking on two legs through lamplight and dark alleys. He loves women's hair. He loves the colors of their skirts. The smell of dust, smoke, horse shit.

 

Always, though, in earshot of the tide.

 

Docked in Havana, he swims for the first time, alone amongst the rocks long after dark, where no one can see or follow. It is strange to be human underwater. The salt burns his eyes. It tangles his hair. He pulls himself onto a rocky outcropping, watches the shiver of the moon on the waves. He waits for his breath to return to him.

 

* * *

 

The captain is a fool. Parrish insists they will sail even though the whisper of pirates is hot on the wind. _This_ ship can outrun them, he says. No one on the deck below believes him.

 

The black-haired boy makes himself useful. He doesn't complain. He helps secure the hold with a smile on his face. He keeps his face turned to the wind and squints his eyes in search of canvas on the horizon.

 

When, three days at sea, he sees them, he doesn't say anything.

 

When the others see them, he slips below decks and out of sight.

 

* * *

 

They lose the pursuing ship in the night, but come morning he can still smell the change in the wind. He volunteers to take watch aft and leans there, fingers gripping the railing, scouring the blue. Below him the waves are whipping, sending up spray.

 

He's aching to be back in it, but not yet. He hasn't had his fill of air yet. Hasn't had his thrill.

 

He wonders who it will be, when the black flag appears.

 

* * *

 

He makes himself scarce when the ship appears again, and as soon as the first cannon-fire is let loose he sprints for the nearest storeroom. He has not had time to see the flag. When the boarders come—and of course they will—then, he'll see. Then, maybe, time for something new.

 

He is not alone in the storeroom. The door was closing as he burst in. The cook is there already, red in the face with fear. He is holding something at his side.

 

* * *

 

_You know what that is up there?_

 

_That ship flies the banner of Captain Flint._

 

* * *

 

_II._

 

Flint. Flint. He cannot believe the smallness of the world. He won't believe it until he sees it. And he does, soon enough—red-haired man, all the bearing of a soldier, a golden earring in one lobe.

 

He breathes. Smiles privately to himself. He knows the smell of the blood in that one's veins.

 

Instinctively, he wants to move closer. Open his mouth. Spill this funny little secret. But he has a ruse to keep up. He's a cook now. Here is his new crew. Here is the valuable thing in the pocket of his stolen blue coat.

 

_Flint._ He rolls the name silently in his grinning mouth.

* * *

 

 

He works his way into them. This ship is any other ship. Only the really smart ones can tell there is something wrong with him. Flint. Gates. Bones. Everyone else he has fooled. Already they can barely remember not knowing him.

 

But he must be careful. If he must, he can slip back, into the sea as easily as he came out; but what is that worth?

 

And when he is so close. It's too perfect. He wants, desperately, to share it like a joke with the captain. The man who wants him dead. Not yet, he tells himself. Not quite. There might be a moment. If he can just survive him.

 

* * *

 

_III._

 

No one pays him any mind for all his screaming.

 

They take his leg as quickly as they can, cauterize, bind, take it away, won't let him look. There are a dozen hands on him, comforting, pinning him, mouths murmuring. They expect his screaming. They expect his crying. When he wakes in fits of fever and vague consciousness and screams again, weeps again, they only look at him with pity. They don't understand.

 

Perhaps one in a handful of watchers hears him. Throes and sobs of distress. He can feel the water below the ship, loud and unabating. More than once he is seized with the need to throw himself into it. To crawl to a porthole and fling himself through, before he remembers. _I want to go back,_ he weeps, feeling it like a hook needled in behind his human lungs.

 

Some creatures come ashore in search of a soul. Some creatures leave their flesh behind, are trapped forever. They will not tell him where they have taken his flesh.

* * *

 

 

Flint is waiting for him when he wakes, on the bed below the bright windows in the captain's cabin. The sound of the waves below makes him sick with longing.

 

Flint is looking at him sideways. He looks at him always from the corners of his eyes.

 

The bed in the captain's cabin is his, now, through some unspoken agreement. He cannot be expected to climb into a hammock with one leg. A hammock will do, for Flint.

 

* * *

 

When the infection passes he goes above decks more, to watch walls and buildings topple under cannon-fire. He waits for Flint's jolly boat to return in the dark, against the wall of pale fire on land. He helps him up over the side, the way he'd once come up himself.

 

On quieter nights sometimes he thinks he will tell him. What a story. But Flint's eyes are heavy. His head is full of shadows. He holds his tongue. When Flint leaves his bed and returns to his own, unwilling or unable to be near him for longer than the time it takes to fuck themselves exhausted, he watches the low curve of his spine in the lamplight, the way he shudders in the chill sea air, and keeps the joke behind his teeth.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

_IV._

 

Flint is the one who asks. When their breathing has fallen back in time with the rocking of the _Walrus,_ when their three legs between them are splayed out wanton on the quilt, he asks, a cold voice out of the dark.

 

“What are you?” he says.

 

Flint is sitting up, his back against the wall. In the inky blackness his eyes are hidden.

 

He turns his head to look at him. His instinct is to laugh.

 

Flint is silent.

 

He stops laughing.

 

He hauls himself up on his elbows, grasping backward at something solid to lever up further, until he can rest his back against the post at the corner of the bed. In front of him, in the blue light: his whole leg and his crippled one. An empty space that makes his throat hurt.

 

“I would tell you,” says Silver, “if I knew myself.”

 

Flint says nothing.

 

He could tell him, he supposes. Tell him about the bluish tinge of his real flesh. How black his eyes are. Where the gills sprout along his ribs. How long is the tail that flows out behind him, the green-grey eelishness of it. How very sharp his hundreds of teeth.

 

How he can never go back again.

 

He has never seen another thing like him. In the vast cold water, he is always alone.

 

“Are you afraid of me?” he whispers.

 

* * *

 

_V._

 

Getting aboard is the hardest part. Choosing a ship in this crush is nearly impossible. All of them look the same; all of them feel the same beneath his hand.

 

He finds one a far distance across the bay that will do: quiet, rocking gently. All hands asleep, or so it seems. He has picked the body of a man overboard, drifting quietly to the rocky bottom of the harbor. Nondescript. Barely a man. He waits for his lungs to form. He takes a breath and begins to climb.

 

He won't stay long. He has only been craving it lately: the feeling of something solid, a place to put feet. Never too far from the tide. Ships are perfect. Always moving. Always rolling underneath him.

 

Over the side, immediately, he knows he has been seen, and he pauses, dripping onto the deck, frozen in the gaze of the boy across the deck.

 

He waits for a bell to be rung, a whistle to sound, a call to be made. But there isn't one.

 

“Hello,” he says.

 

The boy relaxes, if only a little.

 

There is no one else in sight. Only this deckhand, keeping watch, who has caught him out.

 

He pauses. Licks his salt-crusted lips.

 

“Might I trouble you for a bit of rum?” he says.

 

The boy has red hair, a handsome face. He comes forward in the lamplight. There is a bottle glinting on the deck behind him.

 

For a moment, he hesitates; then he reaches down, picks it up, passes it over.

 

“Where did you come from?” says the boy.

 

The man overboard drinks—and drinks, until the bottle is sloshing empty; his throat is burning beautifully. Sixty years, seventy, since he has had a drink, he thinks. No telling how long he will go until the next.

 

“The _Rose of Bristol_ ,” he lies. He leans in close, conspiratorially. Whispers. “I killed a man. They're after me now.”

 

The boy's eyes go wide.

 

He puts a finger to his lips. “You won't tell.”

 

The boy shakes his head.

 

“What's your name, lad?” he says, and moves cautiously to the railing, where he lowers himself down, until his unfamiliar legs have stopped aching, and the bottle can rest comfortably in his hand. He hopes the boy cannot see his eyes in the dark. They are black still, he knows—black and slick, still forming into their human mimicry.

 

The boy shifts from foot to foot. Looks up the ship and down. “McGraw,” he says. “What's yours?”

 

He hadn't thought of a name.

 

He pauses for a moment. Past the far side of the ship, past the murky water of the bay, there are lights on in Boston town. In the inn that butts up against the docks, he sees the pale square of an open window; a figure in it—here a spark, and another. Someone lighting a candle the old way.

 

“My name is Mr. Flint,” he says, and gives the boy a smile. “Could I trouble you for more rum from below?”


End file.
